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Without a doubt, B2B marketing is a prime source of revenue. It’s become more than a way for companies to pitch products to potential customers. Whether it is a door-to-door sales or online advertising, it’s a medium of communication.

Yet in the recent years, there’s been a greater demand for unique (and unconventional) marketing campaigns that can attract even more elusive prospects. For example, sometimes the marketing department alone won’t be enough to execute a marketing strategy. Sometimes you bring in even the CEO himself both in terms of advertising as well as casting his life as an industry thought leader.

With all this talk of big data, bigger CRM, and cross-channel automation, you’d think that everyone in the world of B2B marketing and sales is going to look like they work on a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier.

But in truth? In spite of all the tracking, sophisticated security, and big-time data crunching, sometimes it’s still better to go manual when you’re looking for sales leads.

With an age of information comes the race to capitalize it and at the same time, share the benefits of doing so. Yet unfortunately, that’s not usually the picture people have about it these days. Instead, everything from the most harmless lead generation campaigns up to your average government survey is viewed as suspect. “Privacy is dead” cry so many advocates.

Yet because out of fear of offending any such advocates (whether they’re in the telemarketing lists or among blog subscribers), many companies undermine their lead generation efforts.

One could say that being an intern could be the worst and lowest possible position you can get in a company. (If you can even call it job position. After all, interns are still technically in school.) And since it’s been some time since school started, what are the odds of running into interns during your telemarketing campaigns?

It’s easy to think that sales leads are subjective. More specifically, plenty of organizations have marketers and salespeople constantly go back and forth on defining leads that actually produce sales.

What about social media, though? It’s not news that critics love to decry the medium for actually destroying social skills. But from that debate, you can only ask: What defines as social?

Ours is the age high tech information. However, this has plenty people fearing for the future of humanity. As of 2013, today’s average attention span has shrunk down to eight seconds. You can already hear it now. “Nobody reads anymore.” “Kids don’t appreciate fine attention to detail.” “Technology makes us dumb.”

This may sound sagely at first but you shouldn’t adopt this sort of thinking for your email marketing campaign. Why? It’s because it’s an excuse. This makes it easy to shift the blame of bad marketing to something you think is beyond your control.

Yet, by thinking this way you are making prospects and customers the real victim.

Like many social media trends, the Ice Bucket Challenge has received its customary scorn from the crowd that scorns them best. The whole thing seems to reek with the cheesy, millennial stupidity that seems to belie a lack of creativity than an abundance of it.

At least, that’s what you’ll hear from people who typically sling eggs at anything to do with social media. Yet in spite of their argumentation, enlightenment, and sympathetic disillusionment, one thing hasn’t changed.

Not all marketing experiments are corporate invasions of privacy. On the other hand, sometimes experiments themselves need to be utilized within the private confines of your own organization. This extends to the ones you do on the internet.

Ask yourself, how do you expect to improve your B2B marketing strategy if you’re not testing out your ideas? Everything can sound all too good in theory. You’ll have to put it into practice and it may not be worth wasting more of your marketing dollars in case something goes wrong.

Like many apex predators, great white sharks are the top of the food chain. They feared by many and threatened only by few. Too many people have already drawn parallels between this and the business world.

But you know what? There’s never really focus on that special ‘few’ until you see the real picture. Among a shark’s many threats, mankind has proven to be the one that can really wipe the species out. Environmental concerns aside, B2B marketers that use a similar concept will find that even the biggest giants have a glaring weakness that make them prone to a specialist.

B2B marketers are all about generating interest for their own companies. But are prospects the only people who express such interest or does a marketer’s responsibility lie in more than just winning new clients? Other departments such as recruitment could also use a bit marketing support as well.

It’s well known that finding the right employees isn’t just about you sitting at a desk, waiting for people to just ask if you’re hiring. Job advertising is a staple for recruitment but are B2B marketers participating? Getting the right people to work for your company can be just as much vital to sales as potential sales leads.

There are many similarities between appealing to potential candidates and to potential clients:

You need the ads to attract away from competition. Some of the best candidates may already be well settled in their current job. There’s competition here just as much as there is when you’re suggesting a product to consider your business over a competitor’s product.

It needs enough information. Candidates want more detail when it comes to information about their soon-to-be-employer. Often times, this sounds like the recruiter’s job and not the marketers. Sadly, recruiters sometimes fail to include the right amount and only do it out typical fears that their job may be outsourced.

Innovative style – As with marketing in general, recruits are in need of innovating their own lines. “Why should we hire you?” or “What can you contribute to our company?” are a little too 1995. Recruiters need to formulate their content to match processes that are aligned with recent job seeking facts.

Today’s recruiters need more than the typical, technical ‘Looking for Person X with Y Skills.’ They need something that sparks the mind even among those who aren’t actively looking. They need material that is targeted. They need material that is relevant.

They need something that B2B marketers already have. So while winning potential clients may be your primary responsibility, don’t hesitate to help those who could the same skills and resources you’ve got.